Electronic voting machines raise concerns

Published 1:00 am, Wednesday, February 18, 2004

HARTFORD - Lawmakers are being warned about voting machines that record the wrong vote totals and are ripe for tampering.

These are not the outdated lever machines that the state has talked about replacing for years, but the new, state of the art, electronic touch-screen machines - similar to the ones Connecticut wants to buy using federal money secured under the Help America Vote Act.

Lawmakers, who were already worried about the reliability of electronic voting machines, are more so after the publication of a recent study.

House Minority Leader
Robert Ward
, R-North Branford, sent a letter to every legislator citing a study done for the Maryland legislature testing the accuracy of the electronic machines there.

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"I have been one of many voices that have raised concerns about security of electronic voting, as this technology is particularly vulnerable to manipulation," Ward said.

In the letter, Ward quotes the study's findings that the electronic machines, in this case made by Diebold, could easily be manipulated by hackers or corrupt election officials to affect election results.

A spokesman for Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, who has been a strong advocate for replacing the current lever machines with electronic machines, said her office is confident they are secure. That's largely because Connecticut's electronic machines Connecticut would not be hooked to a network, as was the case in Maryland, so they wouldn't be subject to hackers. She said more than 90 percent of voters who used the machines in a pilot project in eight Connecticut municipalities last November gave a favorable response.

But Ward called on lawmakers to move cautiously before requiring Connecticut cities and towns to change their voting machines.

"This report raises serious question about whether our mechanical voting machines should be abandoned in favor of a system that can be clearly tampered with," Ward said.

Marge Gallo
, Democratic registrar of voters for Danbury, said she is uncomfortable about moving to electronic machines.

"We've read the horror stories out there," Gallo said. "I know they say they're safe and secure. But how do we know? What happens of there is a power failure or a machine malfunction, will we lose all the votes?"

Larry Perosino
, spokesman for Bysiewicz, said Connecticut would make a request for bids from companies hoping to supply the voting machines in the coming months.

"People talk about hacking into systems, but these machines stand alone," Perosino said. "Any tampering would require a number of conspiratorial efforts."

"There's no 100 percent perfect system," Perosino said, recalling a municipal race in Bridgeport where a new election had to be called after a lever machine failed to record votes. "But we're confident with electronic voting."

The Maryland report, completed by the research firm
Raba Technologies
, criticized the Diebold AccuVote-TS machines for having no paper record, and needing more security.

A state-sponsored, staged attack on the system found it an "easy matter" to reprogram voter access cards so they could be used multiple times, according to the report. The attackers were also able to change vote totals, either by modem or by attaching a keyboard. The keys that opened the machines were easily duplicated at local hardware stores.

The report did say the state could use the machines, with some security enhancements, for the March 2004 primary. But it recommended more sweeping action before the November election. "Ultimately we feel there will be a need for paper receipts, at least in a limited fashion," the report said.

Some Diebold machines were used in November during the experiment in Connecticut, but caused no reported problems.

Diebold spokesman
David Bear
said in the real world a firm with 74 years of breaking into systems, such as Raba, isn't going try to throw an election. He said poll workers and election officials would be there to stop any security breach.